I’ve come to realize that my political views have shifted over the course of a year and a half. During the 2008 election season and the subsequent transition of power, I considered myself a militant liberal - someone who would pick a fight just for the sake of picking a fight, just to show myself how irrational the other side was. I watched the MSNBC prime-time block almost every night, read The Nation, and, yes, I frequented the HuffPo and the Daily Kos.
Now my political views are a little more complicated. I hate the consumerist culture we live in, where it’s second nature to care what the Joneses think. I’m supremely pissed from a Huxleyist angle, in that I’m afraid we’re too distracted to see we’re being fucked by every system that wants a taste. To that effect, there’s a little Carlinist in there because we’re losing our shit because we’re actually getting dumber. Then there’s still the militant in me - I was just born too late to join the Yippie movement. For reasons too complicated to explain, I’m jaded about the media. And when it comes to the economy? The truth is, I’m fiscally apathetic and irresponsible because I see no value in money. But really, all in all, I’m tired of the fucking stupidity.
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I haven’t had any stories lately because I’ve been too frustrated to actually transcribe them from the margins of my notes. We hit an unexpected turn in our education when the professor who I had been teaching the class, and who offered the nuggets of wisdom I’ve written about here, took a leave of absence with a few weeks left in the semester. The department’s idea to remedy this problem was to put a neoclassical professor in his place to teach a class that was learning heterodox theory. He’s a nice guy and all, and I appreciate how he taught lessons in the awkward situation he was presented.
However, here’s the problem I have. He’s teaching the ‘markets-will-fix-themselves,’ no government intervention, jacking-off to Ayn Rand type of economics that I didn’t want to take an entire semester of. It’s been stressful trying to figure out how to ask the questions that would clusterfuck this style.
But remember the whole “natural law” thing? That was the first of many contradictions I heard between the two styles. He claimed that the markets are natural. Except in the comparison that I used, how saying that is about as equal to saying global warming doesn’t exist, now we’re all drowning in rising sea levels. But I digress.
The next thing that kind of perked my ears up a bit was this quote:
“Do you think the government is better at determining your self-interest than you? It’s kind of arrogant, don’t you think?”
Now, I’m all for freedom, don’t get me wrong. But when there are people screaming at their elected officials about “pulling the plug on grandma” and misspelling protest signs in a hilarious way, I’m inclined to think that people are too stupid to determine their self-interest. And it’s kind of arrogant to assume otherwise.
The new guy also used this metaphor about running. I don’t remember what exactly the metaphor was describing, but here are the basics:
There are two guys running a marathon race. One guy is leading by a pretty decent margin, so he stays at his current pace to pull ahead and keep his distance from his competitor. The guy behind him, though, decides to turn it up and catch up to the leader. Once he passes him and his adequately ahead, he does the same that his competitor did and relaxes his pace. The two pass each other until they come to the end and one racer wins.
Here’s my problem: Have you ever seen a marathon runner!?
At the end of the race, we’re all exhausted.
Previously, my professor has mentioned to the class that he does not own a television. Instead, as readers of this blog know from the lesson “Homework,” he reads copious amounts of stuff. Today someone asked what he does instead of watch the boob tube.
Well, that set him on a rant.
“Did you know that your brain starts functioning properly when you stop watching television for three months? When I go to a friend’s house and watch I can feel my brain start to change. It gets slow, shallow, and superficial. You can’t process the phenomena around you.” He stopped the rant to talk about the textbook material, but not for long. Soon after we started talking about the text, he asked about freedom in the post-9/11 Western culture. He then mentioned that all libraries in the United States must provide information to the federal government.
For example, if I was to walk into my public library at home and check out a copy of the Qur’an, the library’s system will send my personal information (name, address, phone number, other books I’ve checked out, etc, etc) to the FBI. Simply because I checked out a book. Slightly ‘Big Brother’-y, n’est pas?
Yet anyone can get information on the internet without having the federal government immediately contacted. As my professor said, “Any hobo can post something online, go to the public library and print off a New York Times article, hold it up, and say, “Look!”“
Then we rolled back around to the television rant. He told us the main goal of the class wasn’t just to study Macroeconomics, it was to “get our brains to process things the right way.” He then mentioned that the first two months without television are kind of like going through withdrawals.
“I know I’m talking to the number one television culture in the world and I know to you I’m just the crazy German guy right now. I had a professor tell me to do the same thing I’m telling you to do, and I thought he was a nutcase. So I know.”
The moral of the story is that once you stop watching television, buy your books because the library is part of an overarching government conspiracy to spy on the American people. Either that or read the books while in the library and don’t check them out. Also, get outside and walk around.
In class the other day, we got our midterm exams back. The professor gave us some time in class to correct our answers so we could go over them as a class. One of the questions was a “define this term, then explain how it works” kind of thing. As we went over the answers, as usual, our professor got sidetracked and gave us all a life tip.
He explained (I’m paraphrasing here) that if a question starts with a term, define the fuck out of it. If you don’t, you’re basically telling the person grading the answer that, right off the bat, you have no idea what you’re talking about. This takes away from your argument and you look like an idiot.
He’s right. Sometimes I’ll answer a question without defining the terms right at the beginning, and halfway through I’ll realize I’m just bullshitting. It hasn’t hurt me too much just yet, but I’m getting to the point where I actually need to know what I’m talking about.
But until then, I’ll stick with the bullshit.
In class Wednesday, my Professor went on a rant about how most Americans are in debt up to their eyeballs without a plan to get rid of personal debt.
We’re a country of people with no way out.
Does our government reflect that? Does all that national debt reflect the fact that we’re a nation of shopaholics who consume, consume, consume with little thought about the impact we’re having on our own lives?
Forget about the impact on the environment and everything else for a moment.
I try to buy organic, local foods. I try to support small businesses. I really do. But I realized that if we don’t save ourselves from debt, we’ll never save the America that makes economic sense. That’s just the way it is, but that’s not how it should be.
We’re a free country. That means free to buy products from the places you want. With giant corporations owning most of the business for food, how is that freedom?
If you haven’t watched Food, Inc yet, you need to. It’s a huge wake-up call for the average American consumer. And that’s kind of what we need - a gigantic, country-wide shock to jolt us awake. We’ve been asleep for years, and now corporations like the ones that run the food industry can spend their hundreds of millions of dollars on campaign ads for candidates who support their lobbies.
So…who’s going to set the alarm, eh?
Today, my professor was discussing the neoclassical, natural law version of the supply/demand model in comparison to the heterodox, socially influenced one. He was criticizing the naturalization of a man-made and man-regulated economy when he said that we should all be wary of anything in the news justified because it is “natural.”
The first thing that came to mind was the argument against global warming as climate change. That kind of thing is exactly the naturalization of a synthetic issue. There’s scientific evidence that the 19th Century industrial revolution had a significant effect on the environment and the ecosystems surrounding the polluted centers. Hell, even without science we can see the way humans have changed the natural world (i.e. the Exxon Valdez, dolphins in tuna nets, animals with their heads stuck in those plastic 6-pack rings, etc, etc).
It makes sense to me now that the opposition to global warming is that it’s a natural thing. The easiest way to justify doing nothing is to say, “nah, it’s cool, it’ll just fix it self like it usually does.”
And THAT reminds me of this old joke from elementary school:
This guy is in a bar and he sees this hot young lady with blond hair. He walks up to her and asks, “Is your hair dyed?” She says, “It’s natural.” and brushes her hair with her hand.
Later, he sees a hot brunette and asks her, “Is your hair natural?” She says the same as the blond.
Suddenly, he sees a hot girl with green hair. He asks, “Is your hair dyed?” She pushes her hand over her nose, covers it with boogers, wipes it in her hair and says, “It’s natural.”
No, it’s snot.
Yesterday, in my economics class, this guy started arguing that people have an intrinsic need to want. That people are born wanting to do nothing more than consume. In this way, advertising and other influences from the media do nothing to make a person want something more. They just want it.
The professor started arguing with him, asking the student how long advertising has been around. Turns out that, in the course of all humanity, advertising has been around for a fraction of the time that people have walked the earth.
He then mentioned that the first people were hunter-gatherers that worked in a team to share everything that they could kill just to stay alive. They didn’t have possessions, they just had relationships and what they needed to survive. He explained that the communal living of early human tribes were the basis of what humans intrinsically need or want.
The whole time this is happening, I’m in the back of the room with my mouth agape. Normally I’m the person who argues with the student who says anything like this in class. Yeah, I’m that douchebag. But this guy, with a doctorate and a nice suit, just completely leveled this kid. At best, I would have kicked him in the shins and run away. At best. His was a completely rational argument based in reality and there was no way to rebut it.
It may not be economics, but I think I can learn a lot from this guy.
